Monday, October 31, 2016

Staunton, October 31 – The Russian
government has proudly announced that it has bomb shelters for all Muscovites
in the event of a nuclear strike, but officials involved with maintaining these
facilities say that at best they would save only 50,000 to 100,000 of the 12
million residents of the capital and none at all if a nuclear strike hit the
city.

Mikhail Savkin,
head of the Center for Subterranean Research, told the journalist that the
situation is so bad that in some places local residents have been asked to make
contributions of 500 rubles (eight US dollars) each to try to bring the
facilities up to standard.But in many
places, there is no possibility that officials will be able to do that.

Most of the bomb shelters are so
old, so small and so out of date that they would provide little protection in
the event of a conventional attack and none at all in the case of a nuclear one
despite the official existence of a large number of such facilities and the
role of the FSB in overseeing them.

“The main bunker of Moscow is the
metro,” Savkin says. “A megalopolis under a megalopolis. An enormous territory.
Only know this: in the case of a nuclear strike, this sill save no one. And
during a non-nuclear bombardment it will be able to help only for a maximum of
two to three days.” To hope for more without major investment is absurd.

Staunton, October 31 – On February
21, 1918, faced with a German advance, Lenin proclaimed that “the socialist
fatherland is in danger” and that it was the duty of all those loyal to the
workers’ state to come to its defense. Now, 98 years later, some Russian historians
are suggesting that the history of the 1917 revolution is under threat and must
be defended.

In an article in today’s “Kommersant,”
Irina Nagornykh and Viktor Khamrayev report that the scientific council of the
Russian Security Council have discussed preparations for the centennial of the Russian
revolution and the need to oppose efforts to distort the meaning of that and
other events in Russia history (kommersant.ru/doc/3131019).

The experts in
that body are calling for the establishment of a new government center to
conduct that effort, a center which would take up the role of the commission
for preventing attempts at the falsification of history that was disbanded in
2012. But both the Russian Historical Society and the Presidential
Administration are opposed to that step.

Participants at the experts council
said that “the basic threats” to the understanding of Russian historian events
were “the information campaigns of foreign governments, the historical
illiteracy of young people, and the disappearance of historical
scientific-popular books as an independent literary genre.”

They suggested that the most often targeted
events in Russian history are “the nationality policy of the Russian Empire
(with speculation on ‘the colonial question’), the nationality policy of the
USSR, the role of the USSR in the victory over fascism in World War II, the Molotov-Ribbentrop
Pact, and the USSR and the political crises” in Warsaw Pact countries.

Those taking part in the meeting
suggested that they were particularly concerned about what was likely to happen
next year, the centenary of the Russian revolution.And because of this threat, they urged that
the Kremlin set up a system to monitor Western efforts in this regard and then
coordinate the response.

But two important players in this discussion
told the “Kommersant” journalists that they saw no need for such an
institution.Yury Petrov, head of the
Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said that historians
have the situation under control. As evidence of this, he pointed to their
response to recent discussions about the1916 rising in Central Asia.

And a “Kommersant” source in the
Presidential Administration said that there was no reason for the government to
create such a structure. It would have to get involved if and only if there were
a violation of Russian law such as the defense of historical monuments.

Staunton, October 31 – While many
engage in protest less in hope of achieving something than in showing off, Ilya
Milshteyn says, “responsible people … know that in an era of administered democracy,
protest also must be administered;” that is, “those who protest must control
themselves” and operate according to the rules of the game.

They must carefully choose their
targets lest in aiming too high they fail to achieve anything except their own
repression, they must choose the issues they raise so that they are within limits
recognized by the authorities, and they must choose their timing with
particular care, the Moscow commentator says (graniru.org/opinion/milshtein/m.256115.html).

Raikin “called on
his colleagues to display the solidarity of coworkers. He referred to a
constitutional norm: the ban on censorship. He covered with shame extremist
attitudes.” And he picked a target, the deputy minister of culture just low
enough to allow those above him to sacrifice him in order to protect
themselves.

Because of his cleverness, Raikin
attracted attention across the country and won entirely deserved laurels for
his remarks. But even more important, “the shamed power in a worthy fashion
awarded the artist for his talent and bravery” by recognizing what he said as
in part true and taking certain steps.

Raikin ended his speech with angry
words, pointing out that Russians today are living through “very difficult times,
very dangerous and very terrible ones, very much like…” But “happily, he
immediately stopped himself, because had he gone further he would not have
achieved anything but attracting the fire of the authorities onto himself.

That this should be the case is of
course unfortunate and evidence of just how bad things in Putin’s Russia have
become, and it is evidence that “administered protest in an era of administered
democracy is a very subtle thing: a step to the left or to the right and its administered
nature is lost.” And those who engage in it become not protesters but enemies.”

One would like to see a Russia where
those limits did not exist, but clearly the best way for such a Russia to
emerge out of the one that does is for people like Raikin to make use of the
possibilities for administered protest rather than engaging in actions that
will lead nowhere good and that may make the current arrangement even worse.